US senator grills Facebook over facial recognition technology

Facebook's privacy and policy manager Rob Sherman has been grilled in the US senate about the social networking
giant's use of facial recognition technology.

Senator Al Franken called a hearing to probe Facebook about its
introduction of features such as default tag suggestions in photos
and the lack of information about the technology on its site.

Sherman was quick to flag that people could opt out of tools
such as Facebook's tag suggestions, but was keen to emphasise that
the site as a whole was an "opt-in experience". "People choose to
be on Facebook because they want to share with each other."

Franken countered this by saying that Google leaves its facial
recognition capabilities switched off by default on Google+,
believing this information to be "so sensitive that it's the kind
of thing users have to consciously opt themselves into".

Facebook is in an enormous position of privilege by having a
database of around a billion people with photos and their
demographic data. Combine that with facial recognition technology
and they have an incredibly powerful resourced that, in the wrong
hands, could be a cause for concern.

Facebook will currently only suggest tags for people you know,
but the company still has an enormously rich biometric database. We
are more accustomed to entrusting biometric databases with
governments, and even then they are strictly regulated and protested.

The second major concern was the lack of information about how
Facebook uses facial recognition data.

Franken felt that Facebook users couldn't make an informed
decision about facial recognition because Facebook doesn't tell
people that it is using the facial recognition. He flagged up one
page where facial recognition was mentioned, but said that it was
"six clicks away".

The page on the site says: "We currently use facial recognition software that
uses an algorithm to calculate a unique number ("template") based
on someone's facial features, like the distance between the eyes,
nose and ears. This template is based on photos you've been tagged
in on Facebook."

When asked whether Facebook would ever sell its user face
profiles to third parties, Sherman replied: "It's difficult to know
what Facebook will look like five or 10 years down the line, so
it's hard to respond to that."